Forms and Conventions
One of the reasons that Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody (1975) is so regularly cited as definitive of some new era in popular music video is that it exemplifies the grammar of popular music video. While the codes and conventions of the genre are broad, the key feature of popular music video is that moving image is edited in time to the music. Consequently the work of Sergei Eisenstein, Walt Disney and even Busby Berkley are major landmarks in the development of the modern popular music video. However, to view the clip directed by Bruce Gower for Queen as the first music video is inaccurate.  

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While the Panorama Soundie jukebox played film clips over popular songs of the 1940s the rock and roll films of the 1950s introduced audiences to the idea of band performances. Although it started life as a B-movie, Rock Around the Clock, starring Bill Haley, was one of the biggest hits of 1956. The film is composed principally of band performances by Haley, The Platters, Alan Freed and Freddie Bell and the Bell Boys. Just as it is impossible to isolate one single factor in the transformations that took place in youth culture at the end of the Fifties, the reason for the proliferation of popular music television in the period were as complex as they were dynamic. Suffice to say that since the advent of the popular music chart it would seem that  increasingly the lifestyle choices of the affluent demographic of baby boom consumers was cohered around the purchase of highly symbolic popular music products. Music shows like Top of Pops in the UK, American Bandstand in the US and Beat Club in Europe were centre pieces in the emergent youth culture revolution. 

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The momentum of the youth movement in the 1960s can be traced in the transformation of clothing codes and conventions from the fastidious tailoring of the Beatles suit to the long haired rebellion of the hippy era.  From their earliest inception, however, popular music television defined the forms and conventions of the music video: carefully choreographed performances, synchronised to a studio recording of an individual track; close up shots, taken from high and low angles, edited in time with the music. While the BBC obligingly provided their own dance troop (Pan’s People) when an artist was unable to perform on the show, such was the impact on record sales that by the late 1960s record companies were paying big name stars to create short films to accompany single releases when promotional duties over-seas would otherwise prevent them from supporting the release with a television performance. However, while the Beatles Strawberry Fields and Procol Harum’s Whiter Shade of Pale are both examples of early music video, the reason Bohemian Rhapsody is so revered is that the visuals are structured so exactly around the arrangement of the song.

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Representations
The problem with this approach is that for all its clichés one of the defining features of the popular music video is that it subverts more of its own conventions than it adheres to. So while the genre is synonymous with the rock idiom and live performance it also embraces many other genres documentary (U2 Rattle and Hum 1987), Animation (Dire Straits Money For Nothing 1985) as well as more abstract routines (Bob Dylan Subterranean Homesick Blues 1966). Popular music video is relentlessly parodic in its sensibility: borrowing and reworking other texts with knowing irony and self-conscious wit. Popular examples of his include Mary Lambert’s video for Madonna’s Material Girl (1985) in which La Ciccone mimics Marilyn Monroe’s performance of Diamond’s are a Girls Best Friend in Gentleman Prefer Blondes (1953) and the recent promo for Bob Sinclair’s Rock This Party (2006) in which teenager David Beaudouin parodies well known performances by Michael Jackson, John Travolta, Justin Timberlake, Nirvana and Bob Marley. Such playfulness, however, renders the meaning of the representations within popular music video highly ambiguous. 

From its infancy in the late 1970s one of the defining features of the popular music video was its satiric impulse. Before the convention had become cliché Debbie Harry’s presentation of female sexuality in the videos for Blondie’s Eat to the Beat (1979), the first video album, is laced with self-conscious humour to let the audience know that she doesn’t take herself too seriously. Likewise, though Duran Duran may well be playing out their own pop stars lives in the video for ‘Rio’ (1984), it is executed with a wink and nudge to let us know they don’t quite believe their own hype. Even in the worst excesses of late 80s stadium rock, hackneyed depictions of mean and moody men are undercut in the flamboyant performance of poodle haired rockers like Jon Bon Jovi and Steven Tyler. 

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The dividing line between parody and pastiche, however, is a fine one. As budgets expanded pop music video became a means to its own end. The purpose shifted from witty commentaries on pop culture to the spectacle of the production itself. For example, while we can commend Michael Jackson’s Thriller for purposefully eschewing the conventions of popular music video (and those of jeopardy suspense films for that matter!), the end result is more about the self-aggrandisement of the star and less about experimentation within the medium. The same can be said about a whole series of epic music videos that appeared at the beginning of the 1990s. Both Gun’s and Roses November Rain  (1992) (directed by Andrew Morahan) and Meat Loaf’s I Will Do Anything For Love (1993) (directed by Michael Bay) strive for Hollywood style cinematography. However, both lack the charm of more low-fi productions.

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Unsurprisingly the mid 90s were characterised by a backlash against this intemperance. Grunge, Brit-pop and the phenomenon of MTV Unplugged made the airbrushed excesses of late 80s production values seem blundering an insensitive. The pre-occupation with authenticity that characterised all three trends made manifest in a return to more abstract and simple film making styles. Samual Bayer’s, promo for Garbage’s Stupid Girl (1996), for example, was made in just four hours: a memorable effect achieved simply by scratching the celluloid. Likewise Kevin Godley’s video for Blur’s Girls and Boys (1994) is a simple band performance imposed over a montage of library footage depicting holiday makers on a Mediterranean 18-30 holiday. 

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The freedom that exists within popular music video has resulted in claims by some that it is now an ‘auteurs medium’. Directors train to shoot music video and it is usual for particular directors to have their own style. The videos of Swedish director Jonas Ackerland (Cardigans, Metallica, Christina Aguilera) and Chris Cunningham (Bjork, Aphex Twin, Leftfield) for example, have their own particular aesthetic. However, while videos within the pop/rock idiom have certainly become more experimental, ‘white music’ has now been usurped by hip-hop and r’n’b as the dominant popular music genre. Representation of conspicuous excess or ‘bling’ now characterise the mainstream of pop music video. And, commensurately, productions for artists like Missy Elliott, Puff daddy, TLC and Will Smith rank amongst the most expensive videos ever.

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Institutions
Transformations in the conventions and representations of popular music video, however, do happen in vacuum. Just as the vernacular of editing sound to image goes back to the earliest days of cinema, so too are contemporary revisions in dialogue with the institutional structure of the music industry. Digital technology, broadband and mobile phones are all changing the way in which audiences consume popular music video. Quite clearly the most significant event in the evolution of the music video was the advent of MTV. However, that in itself was predicted on the proliferation of the technology for satellite communication.

 

Appropriately enough it was a member of The Monkeys (a band put together by US television for a television sitcom of the same name) that championed the idea of popular music video.  After producing a video in 1977 for his solo single Rio, Mike Nesmith sold the idea of a music video television show to Times Warner as a promotional device for their record division. The result Pop Clips ran between 1979 and 1981 and was a direct ancestor of MTV. Warner Cable had pioneered the interactive technology with Sight and Sound and music show that allowed audiences to interact with the broadcast by allowing viewers to vote for their favourite songs and artists. The first transmission of MTV was on August 1st 1981. Much is made of the first song broadcast  Buggles Video Killed The Radio Star (1979). However, just as that songs chart tenure preceded MTV by some two years, to fully understand the rise of popular music video we have to look to those post-punk stars that had gone onto to become mainstream success and one UK based music magazine.

 

While punk had been characterised by alienation, nihilism and rebelliousness, those stars that followed in its wake were less concerned with issues of authenticity and substance. Blondie, Madness, The Cars, The Jam, The Pretenders, The Police etc all had credibility, but wanted and had mainstream pop hits. Influenced by the Sixties, The Beatles, The Stones, The Kinks, Bowie, Roxy Music and Warhol, these bands were not troubled by the division of art and commerce. And so, although coveted by the self consciously serious inkie music press in the UK (NME, Melody Maker, Sounds) they also created a space for more ephemeral forms of pop journalism. Enter Smash Hits. Launched by EMAP in October 1978 the magazine differed from the broadsheets not only in its glossy A4 format but also its irreverent and witty tone. In the proceeding years it helped transform the pop landscape in the UK from cold war Poland into a pantomime of colour with the emerging New Pop; artists like Duran Duran, Adam and the Ants, Spandua Ballet and Culture Club did not work on the smudgy pages of the broadsheets but required instead the pin-sharp Technicolor of Smash Hits. These were artists who understood that visual style was as important, and sometimes more so, than the music. Consequently, it was their promotional films that proliferated in the early days of MTV. Often characterised as the second British invasion of the American charts, artists like Eurythmics, Tears for Fears and Wham! all enjoyed considerable chart success on the back of heavy MTV rotation.

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The legacy of EMAP on the forms and conventions of the music video did not end with Smash Hits, however. The diversification of the company in the 1990s to include FM radio as well as digital radio and television has manifest itself in the fragmentation of popular music video. With the stated aim of providing brand driven, niche market products aimed at defined communities of consumers, EMAP has been quick to capitalise on its stable of music press titles. Q, Smash Hits and Kerrang have all been developed as multi-platform brands: as well as having their own web sites, all exist as digital radio as well as television channels (Smash Hits TV living on posthumous to the closure of its print-based namesake). Consequently, while the pop video may be an extremely diverse medium within musical sub-genres there is relative uniformity in terms of the codes and conventions. As the death of BBC’s Top of the Pops is testimony, narrowcasting is now the order of the day; so while Top of the Pops 2 lives on as a specialist nostalgia show, there is no longer an audience for a single bandstand programme showcasing a broad spectrum of popular music.

Audiences
A common misconception is that popular music video is a medium aimed strictly at teenage audiences. While contemporary definitions of popular music hark back to the birth of youth culture in the Fifties and Sixties, audiences for popular music video span the generations. There is an ageing demographic of music consumers for whom popular music remains an integral part of their lives. For example, the success of Bob Dylan’s recent album Modern Times (2006), which went straight into the US Billboard chart at number one (his first album to do so in thirty years), has been attributed to the re-acquaintance of Mr Zimmerman with his original baby boomer fan base. Fifty years on and the first generation of teenagers are now of pensionable age, with high levels of disposable income and more time to spend listening to popular music. The most obvious implication of this for the popular music video is that the representations of age within the genre have expanded to accommodate the maturity of recording artists.

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Many videos of “soft rock” songs, or “Adult Orientated Rock” (AOR) as it is sometime known, have traditionally been directed at an older group of viewers. Artists like Bruce Springsteen, Tina Turner, David Bowie, Foreigner, Fleetwood Mac were all video stars of the 80s who purposefully courted a much older audience. The promo for Springsteen’s Dancing in the Dark (1985), directed by Drian De Palma, for example, reassures its AOR audience with it homely representations of blue collar America in the hard rockin’ affectations of the denim clad star. The work of director Marty Callner who has worked with the likes of Bon Jovi, Stevie Nicks, Aerosmith, Poison, Cher, Whitesnake and Heart is particularly definitive of this genre. These videos work to please the audience and appease anxiety about cultural change by reinforcing stable and familiar conventions: exquisitely shot live performances, love stories and nostalgia. In the case of the videos for Cher’s Heart of Stone (1989) and Stevie Nicks’ Sometime It’s a Bitch (1991) this is manifest in the inclusion of archive footage from earlier periods in the artists’ career. While AOR may be smaltzy at times, the codes and conventions of today’s crop of hot young things are accessible to a broader spectrum of popular music audiences than ever before. Bands like The Killers, Franz Ferdinand and The Kaiser Chiefs have more bite than Coldplay or Radiohead, however, they are unlikely to scare the horses amongst a crowd more used to Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin or Sid Vicious.

Received thinking is that there will always be the next big thing; a musical movement cohered around generational rebellion. However, popular music is now mainstream: youth is no longer synonymous with popular music, but rather popular music is synonymous with youth culture. On the one hand this can be attributed to the corporatisation of the industry: popular music has become increasingly streamlined, niche marketed and synergised. There is nothing to fundamentally distinguish music from other forms of popular entertainment and big name media brands: the ‘MacDonald’s effect’. On the other hand, it is perhaps just an inevitable consequence of sixty years of peacetime and prosperity. Post-modernity, or late capitalism as it sometimes known, is often characterised by the collapse of the distinction between the real and the simulated and in this sense popular music is but a free floating ‘signifier for youth’, to which audiences can ascribe themselves, regardless of their age. Today’s pop kids are second if not third generation teenagers: their parents and in many cases their grandparents were born after the Second World War. 

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Where today’s youth differs radically from the generations that preceded it is the unprecedented access it has to both the history and the vanguard of popular music. On the one hand, it is well documented that the success of the Arctic Monkeys over the last eighteen months has been testimony to the power of MySpace (the social networking website purchased by Rupert Murdock in 2005 for 580 million dollars). The web site bypasses conventional distribution operations and enables audiences to stream the music and videos of unsigned bands directly onto their home computer. On the other hand, as the video for their cross over single ‘I Bet That You Look Good on the Dancefloor’ (2005) also proves, contemporary audiences for popular music video are more switched on to the history of the genre than ever before.  The clip, directed by Huse Monfaradi, recreates the feel of the music show The Old Grey Whistle Test, which ran on the BBC between 1971 and 1987: before any of the Artic Monkey band members were even born. Such trends can be attributed to the proliferation of archive footage from the vaults of television shows like Top of the Pops, American Bandstand and Musikladen that is now finding a new audience courtesy of the video sharing web-site YouTube. The value of this new medium to the communications industry was demonstrated in October 2006 when Google purchased YouTube for 1.85 million dollars.

Founded in 2005 by three employees of PayPal, like MySpace, YouTube allows bands to show diy video footage online. Fans can also post archive clips from TV shows, as well as television recordings of professional music videos from established artists. Other new formats however, are proliferating: karaoke style miming to well known songs, montages of still images, as well as live concert footage taken on mobile phone video cameras are examples of the way in which audiences are redefining the conventions of popular music video.  Sorting material by the date added enables the user to view material within seconds of the footage being uploaded. Consequently the framework in which the meaning of contemporary popular video is understood is the vertiginous giddiness of the perpetual past, present and future. All of this has implications for contemporary understanding of pop music video. On the one hand, spoofs of well known productions like 21 year old “Flowrocks” parody of Johan Renck’s promo for Madonna’s ‘Hung Up’ (2005) ‘Hung Up on Crack’ (2006) reinforce the conventions of the pop music video: lip-synching, choreographed dancing, urban locations etc. On the other hand, it has also served to inaugurate a new DIY aesthetic whereby the kind of low-fi productions achievable by the audience themselves bestows a certain authenticity and kudos.

 

Mainstream stars like Moby, for example, have started commissioning alternative low-budget videos specifically for the You Tube market: a $1000 dollar promo for his collaboration with Debbie Harry on ‘New York New York’ (2006) premiered on You Tube three weeks before the official video was unveiled on terrestrial television. The anticipation of course is that success on YouTube will translate into mainstream media coverage and unit sales. For example, OK Go’s self-made video for the single ‘Hear It Goes Again’ (2006), which features the band performing a choreographed dance routine on syncopated treadmills, propelled the band into the limelight after clocking up one million views on You Tube within six days of its initial posting.

Conclusion
So how do we begin to fix contemporary definitions of popular music video? Certainly it is unstable. While its origins can be traced to the silent movie era, it was really the birth of youth culture in the 50s and 60s and the proliferation of music television shows that defined the forms of the genre. Carefully choreographed performances, synchronised to a studio recording of an individual track, close up shots, taken from high and low angles, edited in time with the music were all features of shows like American Bandstand, Top of the Pops and Musikladen. However, one of the defining features of the popular music video is the purposeful subversion of these conventions layered over an innately parodic sensibility; from the Beatles to Bob Sinclair pop music videos tend of embody a burlesque aesthetic.  Of course at its worse pop music video is a travesty: characterised instead by the conspicuous excess of over-blown faux Hollywood effects, epics of gaudy overstatement and self-congratulation. 

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Much is made of the legacy of MTV in the evolution of the pop music video genre and clearly the 1980s were a time of intensive development within the medium However, just as the germination of Mike Nesmith’s idea was dependent on the proliferation of satellite technology, so too was it fed by the success of the colourful Smash Hits formula for pop music stardom. Although the fragmentation of the market in recent years can be attributed to the rise of new digital technology, within those niche markets there is greater uniformity. The irony is, however, that audiences for popular music video are more varied than ever before. Unsurprisingly the real action is taking place online. Myspace and YouTube have shaken up the way that audiences consume popular music video.  On the one hand, the rehabilitation of archive footage has clearly reinforced certain aspects of the genre. On the other hand, the increased opportunity for interactivity from audiences more sophisticated than ever before is taking popular music video in completely new directions.  However, for the time being at least, one thing remains the same: from Bill Haley to Ok Go it is the way in which the moving image is edited in time with music that is perhaps the defining feature of popular music video.